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Have you heard about the simulation hypothesis? It is the idea that the universe, as we perceive it, is essentially a form of simulation of reality that has been explored in Real scientific research, Philosophical textsAnd major plot devices in many films. Well, a new physics paper on… The nature of the information She claims that if her findings are validated empirically, it will be major evidence for the idea that we are all living in the biggest 4X giant strategy game ever.
Newspaper release news (via MSN) has been very popular in general scientific reports. The researcher in question, Dr. Melvin Forbon, has spent a large portion of his career in physics studying information theory, going so far as to propose a universal law called The second law of information dynamicsbased on a previous theory of his called The principle of equivalence of mass, energy and information.
The gist of it is that information is the same as energy, and therefore has mass; Dr. Forbon suggested that this could be explored through an experiment in which information is removed from a storage device, which is recorded for any changes in mass.
Dr. Forbon is convinced, predictably, that his findings have major implications (e.g. The “missing mass” problem. His theory has clearly been resolved in cosmology), not least the suggestion that, if his work is validated, it would go a long way in showing that the simulation hypothesis is more than just an idea.
He writes: “The second law of informational dynamics appears to be universally manifest and is in fact a cosmological necessity, and we can conclude that this refers to the fact that the entire universe appears to be a simulated construction.”
“A super-complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimization and compression mechanism in order to reduce computational power and data storage requirements.”
Dr. Forbon doesn't provide a huge amount of evidence to support the latter – his suggestion that the spread of symmetry in nature is essentially equivalent to a compression algorithm is about the same size – but his work certainly makes one ponder what exactly a computer running the universe would be like?
The CPU alone would need a fair number of cores and the clock speed would be very high as well, as processes in the subatomic world take place over such short periods that anything running in the gigahertz region would be extremely slow by millions of commands.
Then there is the enormous amount of memory, or random access memory (RAM), or non-volatile storage, required to track every particle in the entire universe. Imagine how much energy would be used to operate it? That would make a 1000W super chip seem quite lightweight by comparison.
But is the universe really a simulation or a computer game played by a stray mega-being or two in another dimension? If it's the latter, my money would be on a 4X strategy game, like Civilization 6 Definitive Edition.
Then again, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out that the universe is actually just a very difficult MMORPG and that humanity is still a few billion years away from amassing enough experience points to reach the next level.
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